The Tenth Witness (Henri Poincare Mystery) (25 page)

The woman stood and blocked my way into the cathedral. She pointed to a crucifix, then to her child, muttering, “Jesus, Jesus.” On cue, the child dropped to her knees in a prayerful pose, lifting her eyes not to God but to me. Her eyes were the eyes of wretched, impoverished children who stare from billboards and magazines.
Give,
they said.
Give!
Tourists behind me waited. How, at the entry to a house of God, could a decent man refuse?

There was no way, not this time. The gypsy beggar cared nothing for houses of God. She had chosen that day’s venue as deliberately as the man with a pushcart in the cathedral square, hoping to do a brisk business. Her goal was very clear: to slip the blade of a knife through my conscience, into my wallet. She dared me not to feel guilty in the shadow of a cathedral. I was furious. I felt used. She had ambushed me.

And when she touched my arm, I jumped as if she were leprous.

Liesel had seen none of it. She called after me, but I pointed to the sign for the lavatory and disappeared into a two-stalled water closet that reeked of bleach. I scrubbed furiously to clean myself, and I began to mutter curses.
Get it off. Get it out! Cow,
I said under my breath.
A whole fucking race of beggar cows.
When I looked into the mirror over the basin, the man who looked back was weeping.

Whole fucking race?

The words unmoored me.

I staggered from the lavatory and told Liesel I had to leave, alone, that I was suddenly ill. She pressed me for details, asked if I needed a doctor, asked if she had said or done anything to offend me, cried when she saw my tears.

“It’s
me
,” I managed, begging her to leave me alone.

I found a taxi and took it straight to my apartment, where I threw myself into packing up the lab, preparing for Anselm’s movers. And then, hoping to drain the swamp of my self-disgust, I walked. But I could not walk long enough or far enough to escape what I discovered: an evil seed I’d assumed was a
German
seed. I was a liberal, postwar Frenchman. I was better than the Nazis and the children of Nazis, above the rank hatreds that made the Reich possible. I had
nothing
to do with all that. But there it was: in my revulsion for the Roma, a revulsion for Jews, blacks, this tribe and that tribe. I had felt physical, stomach-churning disgust at the touch of a hated other.

It was a fine summer evening. Streetlamps blinked on. Couples sat in cafés and children chased each other on sidewalks. Dachau was an orderly, handsome suburb no different from a thousand others. First the children disappeared, called in for a bath and bed. Then the couples, arm in arm, ducked into their apartments for wine and lovemaking. The traffic eased, and in time I was left to myself—the very last person whose company I wanted to keep.

I walked, but the cool night air did nothing to ease my fever. I walked blindly, amazed. This wasn’t the way I imagined myself in Germany, the one country in the world that prompted me to gird myself, thinking each time I entered:
Forty years ago this place was hell on earth—and these people, and their parents and grandparents, let it happen. You can live among them, Henri, but you’re not one of them.

Apparently, I was.

I walked, exhausted, without a clue where I might be headed and pushed on, hoping to numb myself. Night yielded to a foggy dawn and a procession of people going about their business. Traffic picked up, the streetlamps died. I walked, and in the hollows, the mists gathered about my legs. Through a stand of trees, I saw a bank of lights and headed that way. The closer I drew, the surer I was that all that long night my feet knew exactly where they were taking me.

I saw the guard towers first. I saw barbed wire rising to a height impossible to scale, tacked to concrete pillars buried deep in the earth. I counted barracks. I saw a chimney. I walked the perimeter and found the administration building, with its front gate of heavy iron and its infamous
Arbeit Macht Frei.
In the mists, it might have been a dream. God knows I was tired enough to be dreaming. But this was real. They had done it. Typhus and stench, cattle cars filled with rotting bodies. Death. Gas. Excrement. Hangings. Starvation. Ovens. Blood. History was real. I had come upon the Reich’s first Konzentrationslager, Dachau: prototype of the grand experiment, tucked into a pleasant suburb of Munich.

I reached through the gates.

“Isaac. Isaac, I’m sorry.”

I couldn’t find him. He didn’t answer.

“It’s in me, Isaac. The seed’s in
me
. I’m so scared.”

The sun rose. I heard traffic beyond the trees. In a few hours, visitors would arrive and the tours of the camp would begin. The interpreters would explain the Nazi mind, the contempt for others.

I could not do it. I couldn’t walk through those gates and face myself. I returned to the apartment and the lab to collect my things. A freight train passed beneath my open window, a long line of cattle cars destined for the dinner table. I smelled manure and heard a low, plaintive mooing. Someone down the line pulled a lever. Tracks switched into place and the train turned east. A whistle blew and the building beneath me rumbled.

thirty-three

L
iesel had left several messages on my phone. Unable to reach me, she came to my apartment half expecting to find my remains sprawled across the kitchen floor. It was a Kraus facility, so the superintendent let her in. She left a note, and when I appeared at her apartment later that day to apologize, she fell into my arms, then stepped back and slapped me. “I was calling
hospitals,
Henri! What happened?”

A fair question.

I could have told her I now knew why she didn’t want children. Or that I saw something in myself that convinced me I shouldn’t have them. She asked if we were okay and, again, if she had done anything wrong. I said that the running was my problem, not hers, though I didn’t explain.

In the end I told her I saw a ghost.

“You scared me,” she said.

I’d scared myself far worse.

Low-budget horror films often feature a long, dimly lit corridor at the end of which is a door that mustn’t be opened. Again and again, the director returns to the corridor. We hear cries and whispers. A bare light bulb swings. We approach and retreat until, inevitably, the door swings wide and all manner of grief pours out. People have such doors, I think. I opened mine and found the stuff Nazis were made of.

And Liesel wanted me to talk about it.

I
PLANNED
one last stop before leaving Germany, the history department at the University of Hanover. Since reading the biography of Otto von Kraus, I had wanted to contact the author, A. Bieler, whose signature was logged immediately before mine on every file I’d pulled at Ludwigsburg.

I was ready to bet that Nagel was Gottlieb, and that he’d come to Europe to exact some sort of punishment. But the logic of the camps would have dictated the reverse, that the tortured would hunt the torturer. Then there was Reinhard Vogt, also listed in multiple captions as Death’s Head SS, the one Zeligman had cursed. Their photos had gone missing, and I was hoping Bieler could point me in a fruitful direction.

But I could find no trace of Herr Bieler. He had listed his academic affiliation as the University of Hanover, Department of History. Yet when I called, the secretary told me that no one by that name appeared on the roster of full- or part-time faculty, or as a student. The young man was willing to check records going back five years. I called the following week and received an even more definitive answer. No A. Bieler had ever taught at or enrolled in the university, let alone declared history as a major field of study.

I smelled a fraud in the air, and I was determined to track its source. If the biography was suspect, so too was the temple Liesel had constructed to the memory of her father. And if Otto were something less than the hero his biographer made him out to be, then Isaac’s life at Drütte was probably darker than I dared imagine.

I made an appointment with the department head and found her in the former Welfen Castle, set amid the royal gardens of Herrenhausen. The maintenance crews were busy preparing the campus for the return of students. Flower beds were mulched and bursting with color, the grass trimmed and the paint fresh. I paused beside a bronze sculpture, a horse kicking its forelegs, and was seduced, all over again, by university life. Part of me loved nothing better than working in libraries and labs on obscure problems. But another part, a more visceral part, was impatient to see something in the world change for my efforts.

Engineering offered a compromise. I could begin with a problem mundane or glorious: traffic flow at an intersection in London, or the exoskeleton of a seventy-story tower in Madrid. I would study. And using fundamental laws, say, of thermodynamics or the science of stress loads, I could create from thin air a solution, more or less elegant. Then the architect would build in stone or steel or glass, and some problem in the world would go away. It would be settled, and people would stop arguing for a minute or two. They would step inside, through, and around the creation, while I moved onto the next challenge.

Nothing about my world that summer was so tidy.

“Someone wrote this book,” said the department head, pointing to the biography of Otto Kraus. “Because here it is. But Professor Bieler had nothing to do with our university. Given that and the fact that Hanover is listed as Bieler’s academic home, I’d say someone was trying for a show of academic respectability. So I wouldn’t give any weight to any claim made in these pages.”

I left her office convinced that Anselm had written the biography himself, or paid some itinerant scholar to craft a fiction, then slap a name and an affiliation on it. It was a puff job worthy of a corporation that profited from business with the Reich. Siemens, Bayer, Ford, and General Motors had all whitewashed their profit-making and use of slave labor during the war. Why shouldn’t Kraus Steel? Once I made that leap, Anselm’s fraud was easy to see for what it was: an exercise in public relations. Undoubtedly, he or his ghostwriter used the University of Hanover because it was the jewel of Lower Saxony, where Otto was born and Hermann Göring built his steel mill. No library in the world held better information on the Reichswerke or von Kraus’s rise, and that same information would be available to me. I settled into a study carrel with three sets of books: general histories of Germany between the wars, histories of Lower Saxony, and studies of the Nazi industrial machine.

The first thing I learned was that von Kraus’s story began well before 1939, when Göring chose him to run the Reichswerke. Fifteen years earlier, inflation had grown so desperate in Germany that a loaf of bread cost 670 million marks. People carried suitcases of near-worthless paper money into shops to transact daily business. In November of that year, 1923, with the nation reeling from political incompetence, street violence, and a crushing war debt, Adolf Hitler and a small army of disaffected veterans—including Göring—attempted to seize power in Munich. They called themselves National Socialists. The putsch collapsed, and Hitler was sentenced to incarceration in a luxurious prison where he wrote
Mein Kampf.
In his trial, he offered so forceful a defense of his desire to restore the Fatherland’s economy and honor that his remarks, reported faithfully by the German press, propelled him to fame.

Ten years later, as Chancellor of Germany, he built the first concentration camp at Dachau. A year after that, he combined the titles of chancellor and president to become Führer and banned Jewish newspapers from public sale. By 1936, in response to an agricultural crisis, he charged his friend and confidant Hermann Göring to rebuild Germany and re-arm in preparation for war.

This was the moment where German history and the history of Otto von Kraus intersected. Hitler demanded a four-year plan for self-sufficiency, and among Göring’s first priorities was to free the nation of its dangerous dependence on foreign ores. The goal: for the Reich, without interference, to produce German steel that could be made into German tanks, German aircraft, and German trucks.

Which was how Göring came to the iron-rich district of Salzgitter. Here, he could control the means of production by mining iron, building mills to smelt the ore, and erecting factories to shape steel into bombs. The Reichswerke Hermann Göring was born. By decree, the formerly loose collection of villages spread across a vast acreage of forests and fields became the city of Salzgitter, a single administrative unit dedicated to making steel for the Nazi war machine.

Göring needed managers. He surveyed the available talent and determined that von Kraus, a man with solid Aryan credentials who owned a small but efficient mill, would do. As if touched by a magic wand, von Kraus rose overnight from obscurity to a position of such importance that the fortunes of the Reich itself could be said to rest as much on his shoulders as on those of its soldiers.For nations cannot prosecute wars without guns and bombs, and these can’t be made without steel.

Von Kraus became a hero. Much was expected of him, and he exceeded quotas with such regularity that Göring called him to Berlin to receive a commendation. There, von Kraus shook hands with the Führer and learned that for as long as the Reich thrived, so would he thrive. None of this did A. Bieler report in his biography.

What I needed was to find someone who
knew
von Kraus, someone from the old days, from Salzgitter. Hanover was only sixty-five kilometers northwest of the town. An hour’s drive the next day would put me there.

“So you’ll be wanting a man with white hair,” said the librarian I consulted. “Someone who didn’t move away.” He pulled phone books and census data. He consulted municipal registries. On my behalf, he spent forty minutes on the phone with locals who told him that one longtime mayor was dead, though his cousin might be alive. The cousin passed the librarian to an acquaintance, who passed him to the local historical society, whose president pointed to a member raised on a farm in Salzgitter-Bad, one of the original twenty-nine villages. The librarian phoned and spoke with that person’s granddaughter, who spoke with her grandfather, who agreed to an interview the next day.